Joe hadn't been back to Greeley since he'd left, had decided to avoid location-based triggers that might evoke memory—his lovely wife, pregnant, laughing as a thick milkshake mustache dripped down her chin at JB's Drive In. “Say it five times fast!” Mandy had insisted, and they'd both tried it, giggling like fools, over and over. Marshmallow milkshake mustache marshmallow milkshake mustache marshmallow milkshake mustache. Or years later, at the junkyard off Highway 34, the one with the observation tower he'd paid a buck to climb with DJ so the boy could marvel at the view of the Rockies on the western horizon. Mandy's minivan, the car he had spent so many days off working on, had been hauled there after the wreck, was there still, he imagined, crumpled, rusting in the cruel sun. She'd driven off a bridge into the South Platte River. Witnesses reported a sudden jerky swerve, a loss of control, enough momentum to half break, half jump the crumbling concrete barrier, but there had been no sightings of what, if anything, had been blocking the road. They'd managed to pull an unconscious Mandy out in time, but DJ was already gone.

Joe asked for extra shifts instead of weeks off, and his supervisor was more than happy to shave his breaks. He killed the rare empty day playing Gran Turismo on an ancient PlayStation 2, taking breaks on the smokers' plaza. The gas rigs were a new world—unceasing, unstoppable—and working eighty, ninety hours each week had made him the small fortune he needed to pay for Mandy's care in a long-term care facility back in Greeley, where she lived now.

“We're not sure she'll ever fully recover,” the nurses had told him, and he'd nodded, mute. Of course she wouldn't, and neither would he. He loved her, still he loved her, imagined her with him on the rig, an angel on his shoulder. The things he couldn't forgive he just had to bear, but Mandy was an exception—he could neither forgive her nor bear seeing her. He'd broken his own heart and left town, the condition of Mandy's heart in the capable hands of the facility staff.

Dustin stuffed his pockets with sausage biscuits and filled his thermos with coffee. Joe grabbed sack lunches for them both. “You look like shit,” Joe said. “Sure you don't need a day?”

Dustin shrugged. “The cough is a real bitch at night, but it gets better in the daytime.”

Joe nodded. It was the same with his dreams. In the bright light of day he didn't imagine DJ's fading struggle against his seat belt, the river current flowing through his hair, through his lungs. In the bright light of day, he didn't stop to wonder whether Mandy had a real accident or whether she'd meant to drive into that river.